UA Venture Capital Fund LLC, a new, early-stage venture capital firm aimed at supporting University of Arizona technology spinoffs, has made its first three investments including in Regulonix, which is commercializing a new kind of non-opioid painkiller.

Researchers at Translational Genomics Research Institute discovered a gene associated with “SuperAgers” that it hopes to target with new drugs to reduce age-related memory loss and perhaps help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Asthma, Alzheimer’s, cancer, the aging immune system, diabetes, precision medicine and Valley fever are among the health issues being tackled by University of Arizona Health Sciences researchers with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Northern Arizona University has received the green light to establish a College of Engineering, Informatics and Applied Sciences to accommodate growing interest in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Life365, which brings together available, connected technology through its health software platform to allow remote patient monitoring, was granted a patent this month for any medical device intended for home use that talks to wearables.

Arizona’s more than 8,000 tech firms supported over 168,000 jobs and paid $15.7 billion in wages in 2016, according to a new study, and the state ranked second among six Southwest states for tech employment growth from 2015 to 2016.